Performing the “Wilde West”: Victorian Afterlives, Sexual Performance, and the American West

Of all the aspects of Oscar Wilde’s rich afterlife as a cultural icon, the most surprising is the revival of Wilde’s brief encounter with the American West in the form of the Wilde Western. Wilde was linked to the West and the cowboy days after his arrival in America (1882), and this association continued into the twentieth century, finding its way into films, a play, a detective novel, and even a graphic novel. Although these texts dramatize the juxtaposition of the iconic heterosexual masculinity of the cowboy with the iconic effeminacy of the aesthete, they just as often stage their convergence. Reading two twentieth-century texts alongside nineteenth-century reactions to Wilde’s American lecture tour, I explore how Wilde Westerns interrogate, realign, and sometimes tangle the lines between western masculinity, Wildean sexuality, and nationality.